Collaborator
by Rokhal
Summary: The masked doctor won't leave Bucky alone about his time in Krausberg.


Bucky was already in a bad mood—hungry, stinking, back and shoulders aching from days spent cradling his rifle like a broken bone, thighs on fire from clinging to tree branches, neck and hands sunburned, vision swimmy with amphetamines and sleeplessness and the shock of human vision after the far-reaching tunnel of Howard Stark's ludicrous rifle scope. Despite their efforts at secrecy, photographers and a caricaturist from some paper had greeted the Howlies as they slunk into camp. Jones had his shirt half off to keep anything from brushing the strange chemical welts he'd caught on his neck and arm, Dernier looked like a pirate in scavenged SS gear, and Bucky had several layers of eyeblack smeared over half his face and hadn't shaved in two weeks. Steve, at least, still looked like an American hero: Paul Bunyan. They'd ditched the press in a hurry and spent three hours on the grill before Colonel Philips and Agent Carter.

He was in a bad mood already when the nurse, no, the lady doctor grabbed his arm on the way out of debrief. "It's Private Jones needs seen to, ma'am," he said, trying to shrug her off.

Her small hand dug in surprisingly tight, pinching a nerve. Despite himself, he cringed.

"Sergeant James Barnes, 107th," she said, in an unplaceable European accent, and, oh. Bucky remembered her.

In Africa his unit had been charged with clearing buildings one-by-one in a recently-seized port city. Compared to what he would see in the ETO, it was cushy, pleasant duty: there was food to be had, oranges sweet and plentiful, eggs, vegetables, because the locals hadn't been bombed or starved into desperation. There was furniture to sit on, because shivering soldiers hadn't burned it. There were airy homes with exotic curves and geometric mosaics to gaze at. But many of these homes were mined.

In a supposedly-cleared room, Bucky had watched his captain, Sinclair, idly straighten a photograph that hung askew on a wall. The frame had been wired to a hidden fuse. The explosion the trap triggered would have killed everyone in the room and collapsed the house if the TNT had been properly handled. As it was, Bucky was half deaf for two days and his captain, just a kid Bucky's age whose parents had more money and push, lost half a hand and the skin on his arms and face.

This lady doctor ran the field hospital that had set up at that particular city. She had peculiar practices and strange devices Bucky had never seen before or since. What she wanted, she took. She took three of Bucky's privates and set them to work buying and skinning eels while she worked on the captain in a tightly sealed oilcloth tent from which a ticklish smell leaked continually. When she was ready—she and a nurse both unashamedly spattered in blood—she took the damp skins, still floating in bloody saltwater, and slid them through a narrow slit into a metal box that Bucky later learned contained radium. When Bucky was at last allowed to check up on his captain, soon to be shipped home, the man was strapped to his bed, hallucinating out of his mind, and the burns were stuck all over with strips of eelskin. The sight was a horror. Bucky managed an oddly coherent conversation about the Boston Braves with him for half an hour. A couple months later, just before sailing for Italy, the 107th got a letter from the captain, in which he reported that he was recovering well—uncommonly well, for his injuries—and urging them to keep heart and show the new captain that they were a credit to the US Army.

It hadn't seemed odd that the lady doctor wore a surgical mask at all times while tending to her burn patient, but the mask certainly seemed odd now, in the heat and the wind between the command post and the mess.

"What can I do for you, ma'am?" he asked uneasily.

"You met Arnim Zola at Krausberg," she stated.

Her small hand dug punishingly hard into his elbow as he ripped away.

"We must all face what we fear to remember," she insisted. "Your unit claimed that 'medical' was where prisoners were taken for disposal. A transparent lie. I collaborated with Arnim Zola and Abraham Erskine before the Nazi state. They reached the end of _in vitro_ testing long ago. Zola was an opportunist. I need to know what he tested on you. _You_ need to know what he tested on you."

"I kept an eye out for extra toes, ma'am, none so far." Bucky strode toward the mess. He had never hit a woman. She was very small and slight, and around the same age as his mother. She had a subtle lisp under her accent that made her seem more delicate. He could seriously hurt her.

He hadn't known she was a defector. He wondered if Carter knew.

Carter could hit her. He turned on his heel, back toward the command tent.

"Your pain and disorientation must cloud your memory, but scents are eternal," the woman continued, her small feet scrambling to keep up with him. "Erskine's quest brought us unique compounds. Extracts of an herb grown by witches in the heart of Africa. The blood of gods. Zola always chased immortality, a passion Erskine, gentle fool, thought harmless. Now they have been separated six years and Zola has been indulged and cultivated by Herr Schmidt. Has taken his license from Herr Himmler. Your superiors dare not ask, but they must know what Zola was testing. I will not see Hitler or HYDRA win this war."

"Tell it to the brass," Bucky said.

The doctor reached into her breast pocket and pulled out a small glass ampule. Crushed it under his nose. A faint scent, but she was right, _he knew it..._

The injections went on forever. They consumed his senses. Colors swam, his skin chilled, his muscles ached and his lungs heaved. Strange tastes filled his parched mouth, stronger as he wet his lips. The poison was inside him. He drooled it and sweated it. He seized, sometimes awake and sometimes in blanks of memory. He was not dead. He'd thought he'd been taken from the cell to be killed, a waste of porridge in the reckoning of the efficient Germans. But he was still a resource of another kind, and they would use him until they used him up.

"Have you been injured since your rescue?" the lady doctor demanded.

Bucky made a wordless noise and bolted into the command tent like a child afraid of the dark.

Agent Carter startled away from her map, one hand on her sidearm. Colonel Philips gave him a look that would have made any sane sergeant cower to the ground like a whipped dog. Bucky forced himself to breathe, a painful ragged rasp.

"Pull yourself together, sergeant," Phillips barked, and Bucky had been in the Army long enough that his gibbering brain seized on the order and did it. Heels together. Head straight.

"There's a woman outside asking about classified matters, sir."

Philips nodded to Carter and she left the tent. Bucky settled into parade rest without being told, folding his shaking hands behind the small of his back. "Sit, sergeant," the colonel said. He waved at the map. "See if you can make sense of that crazy Polack's intel."

On the map was a sprinkling of colored pins representing armories, barracks, and research facilities courtesy of Private Blaskovitch. The madman hadn't thanked them for the rescue—if he'd even needed rescue; they'd caught up to him by following a trail of dead HYDRA agents into the bowels of a mountain fortress. Bucky could have done without seeing the slaughtered experimental subjects, which reminded him: HYDRA was perilously close to a functional supersoldier program of their own. Why couldn't the lady doctor have cornered Blaskovitch? Let him spill about the volunteers or "volunteers," men warped with drugs and surgeries—shambling giants, with armor plate grafted to their skin like the eelskin on Captain Sinclair's face.

Through the canvas he heard Carter speak. "Gutentag, Doktor M."

They had a low and spitting conversation in German, then French. Too many of the words were unfamiliar for Bucky to catch all of it. He gathered that the lady doctor was under an assumed identity, that if Carter exposed her it would be a terrible fate, military prison or execution. The doctor had a lot of nerve even so, berating Carter, calling her a sentimental coward and a stream of incomprehensible foreign idioms.

She left before Carter could hit her.

"Stay in your hospital!" Carter barked after her retreating footsteps.

The footsteps stopped. "Join me. Surely that is your place as well, woman." Finally, Doctor M left.

Carter reentered the tent, and Bucky stood. His feet were numb. They didn't get on great, something about Bucky's wounded pride or maybe the cold shoulder she'd given Steve for the past few months. Bucky had bigger problems, and for the moment so did she, looking him up and down with honest concern. "Doctor M is a valuable expert but she has no authority over you," Carter told him. "If she ignores my warning—"

"You'll rescue me from her clutches?" Bucky asked with a shaky grin.

"Don't you doubt it."

* * *

Of course, not an hour later Bucky had to brave Doctor M's territory to check how Jonesy was being taken care of. He still hadn't eaten and the mess had packed up between meals, not that he felt it at the moment.

Jones' injuries were not apparently severe enough to warrant skinning some small animal and pasting it to his skin, because the old radium box was nowhere to be seen. Instead he was sitting up, practicing French with a plump young American nurse as she slathered his welts with a violently purple paste out of what appeared to be a cooled ceramic crucible.

It was definitely a Doctor M field hospital; her touches were everywhere. All the nurses wore cotton gloves, which hung at the foot of each bed when not in use. The surgical tent sat within the main hospital tent, leaking its ticklish smell. No one was groaning, but one poor kid, whose bandaged foot looked suspiciously smaller than it should have been, burst into manic laughter continually. Three huge chalkboards dominated the far wall of the tent, lit by a Stark-designed efficient arc lamp. Nurses swooped from bed to bed, scratching down notes, prodding, measuring, now and then converging on a patient to help him over a bedpan or turn him from side to side. The lady doctor herself, he did not see.

Jones looked OK, his nurse wasn't afraid to touch him, and the purple paste must have something in it for the pain because he'd stopped gritting his teeth like he'd tangled with a jellyfish. Bucky didn't want to stay in the tent, but he couldn't make himself leave, until Jones prodded him and said, "I doubt you're my only visitor, Sergeant. Don't you have noncom shit to do?"

He couldn't well say that he was sitting on Jones' bed to protect him from his doctor, who by all appearances was doing a creditable job. He slunk out the back tentflap.

Or, he thought he'd sneak out the back tentflap, but the exit, like the entrance, had a narrow vestibule, a dim black space walled with canvas, lit through a curtain of mosquito mesh that formed the last door. Doctor M was standing there and she startled, one hand flying to her cheek. Bucky squinted. She hadn't been waiting for him. He'd stumbled on her as she took snuff.

"Do you know what Erskine did to Steve?" The question rolled out of him with startling boldness, and he found his courage returned. No one, not Steve, not Philips, not Stark, could really answer this question.

She squinted at him for a long moment, then slowly lowered her hand. Bucky stared. Where her lips should have been, were dry gums, loosening teeth, webby swirls of ancient scars. She was missing half her face.

A third of her face.

Conservatively, a fifth of her face, but Bucky couldn't take his eyes off it. No wonder she was taking snuff. She couldn't well puff on a cigarette.

She put away her snuffbox and looped her surgical mask back around her ears. "No," she said. "We hypothesized several means to perfect the human form, to cure all infirmity. Life, inexhaustible. I know which path I would have pursued, but Erskine remained in Germany for some years after I fled. Who knows what refinements or discoveries he and Zola made. Perhaps he taught a virus how to cure. Perhaps he unearthed Steve's latent divinity. Erskine was an honest man; whatever effects you see in your captain, there is no trick. Not that he intended."

Bucky nodded. He should thank her. He should have kept going out the door.

"But Erskine is dead and he censored his notes," Doctor M continued callously. "There will be no more men like Steve. Zola is where the danger lies."

"Not you?" Bucky asked snidely. His pulse raced.

Doctor M smirked above her mask, and turned back to the hospital ward. "Where would I find the time?"

"You _have_ told the brass, right? Carter and the Colonel? What you know about—about HYDRA?"

"More than you," she accused him, and went back to work.

* * *

Bucky never did get around to telling Carter or Phillips the details of what went on in the medical wing in Krausberg.

* * *

The Commandos minus one. Steve was broken, stunned—he'd kept his men moving, secured the train, retrieved the prisoner, but the light in him that Peggy had always admired was dead. Steve had loved the war to a degree that was almost indecent, and in return it had taken his brother. The others were grim. Losing Barnes, losing any one of them, had always been a pressing possibility to them. This had been the divide between Steve and the real soldiers.

Jones escorted Arnim Zola, a round shivering man with watering eyes. Peggy had expected someone more fearsome, a bookend to Isabel Maru.

Maru, of course, found her way to the Commandos and watched Zola like a vulture; at the sight of her, even bundled in her green scarf, Zola sucked in his lip anxiously, and Peggy let her stay until he was secured. He'd be shipped off to England soon enough, to be cossetted and flattered like a good little enemy agent.

She thought Maru had come to gloat at the fate of her former research partner, but instead as soon as Zola was stuffed into a truck for transport, Maru cornered her.

"You must retrieve Sergeant Barnes' body," she hissed.

Peggy bristled. "It sounds so simple to say it. Retrieve the body. Wrestle twelve stone up a snow-choked mountainside. Find him over five miles of track. Spot him in the drifts. Descend to him without setting off an avalanche. For the Captain's sake, for morale's sake, for decency's sake, _if it were possible it would be done._ "

"For the sake of the war," Maru said. "Zola tested compounds on him related to your Project Rebirth. If you do not retrieve and destroy the body, HYDRA will complete his research! Your Rogers is one man. He cannot save you from a thousand more!"

"I will not send soldiers to their deaths on an elaborate supposition," Peggy said.

Maru made an inhuman noise through her mutilated mouth and turned away, circled back again, gaining steam, stopping in Peggy's path. "By the gods! If Zola achieved what I know he could, the man is still alive!"

"How," Peggy demanded. Sergeant Barnes had fallen at least three hundred feet, while traveling forty miles per hour, in ten degree weather.

"When I left Germany," said Doctor Poison, "we three were at the verge of miracles. I wanted to heal. Erskine wanted heroes. Zola dreamed of immortality. It does not matter how. Do not underestimate Zola. Do not underestimate—"

"Why didn't you just say that at the start?" Peggy interrupted, exasperated. She grabbed Maru's arm and hustled her toward Phillips' tent. "If Barnes could be rescued—"

"How else was I to persuade Command?" A frustrated cry in her muffled voice.

Peggy took pity on her, for the first time in their acquaintance. "Start with Barnes' possible survival. We all love the rascal, God knows why. Save the bit about destroying the body for last. The Howlies have been attached to this regiment for half a year; we'll have volunteers jumping to go after him."

"I don't understand," Maru said.

Peggy looked down at her, so much older and harder but somehow incomplete, grasping at shadows. "War makes life seem cheap," she said. "But it's not worth fighting if we can't look after one another."

"You have a strange idea of war, Agent," Maru said. She patted Carter's hand, and let her lead her into the command tent to lay out the situation for the Colonel.

* * *

 **Notes:**

The "crazy Polack" Private Blaskovitch and his adventures is a reference to the Wolfenstein games, which are basically about HYDRA.

The eel skin incident is based on an experimental bandaging treatment for burns that uses sanitized tilapia skin as a long-lasting bandage. Comfort is better and maintenance much simpler with the tilapia skin, which is simply left in place and allowed to flake off gradually as the burns heal.

I like to think Isabel Maru went into the healing arts after the events of Wonder Woman because I like to think that mercy is sometimes rewarded.


End file.
